BigSky Bloom Reverb – This Week’s Preset: “7 Wonders”

This Week’s Preset: BigSky’s Bloom Reverb and a vintage synth!

Let’s start off the day right, with a vintage synth and BigSky’s bloom reverb machine.

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The Oberheim Matrix-6 synthesizer alongside my BigSky reverb is one of my favorite sonic combinations on the planet. The Matrix-6, manufactured between 1986 and 1988, is a digitally controlled analog powerhouse. It’s not very easy to program, given the completely knob-free top panel. But with this instrument, the tedious patch creation can often be rewarded with some incredibly gorgeous sounds. My BigSky reverb is just about permanently affixed to the top of my Matrix-6, so it was a pleasure to put together some audio clips featuring this duo.

For This Week’s Preset, I went straight for BigSky’s Bloom reverb machine. I wanted the late ’80s sounds of the Matrix to meet the silky ’90s rack reverbs created with the Bloom reverb. In the ’90s, more diffusion blocks were added to reverbs to ‘smooth out’ the sound. A side effect of this was the tendency of the reverbs to have a slowly building envelope that ‘bloomed’, resulting in big ambient reverbs that sit nicely with the dry signal even at high Mix levels. The Bloom reverb features a ‘bloom generating’ section that feeds into a traditional reverb ‘tank’, and adds a unique Feedback parameter that expands the possibilities exponentially.

Here we have a relatively long Decay time of 8.13 seconds, with the Mix at 2 o’clock, allowing the verb to take up a lot of space and time. I set the Bloom length to just over 50%, and the Feedback to 50%, providing a medium ‘bloomed’ sound. Pre-Delay, Tone, and Mod are all set to 50%. Take a listen below. The clip starts with BigSky bypassed, and then it is engaged at 0:06.

Listen here:

Preset details:

Dial up this preset on your BigSky. The image below shows the knob settings and secondary parameters.

Video

Here’s a video that I put together that contains this BigSky preset, along with several others!

Download the preset:

Using the Strymon Librarian or our new Nixie preset editor? Download the preset and load it into your TimeLine.

What do you think?

Made your own tweaks to this preset? Post them below. Are there other preset types that you’d like to see in upcoming blog posts? Let us know what you think. Happy reverb-ing!